Stakeholder Analysis!

If you don’t know why and whom you are fighting for, you cannot win the battle.

My experience tells, if you perform Stakeholder Analysis perfectly, you will get to know Key Players of the project; and familiarizing yourself with their needs will help us to capture project requirements lot easier.

Stakeholder Analysis is one of the first step which is required to perform on a project, it may be performed multiple times throughout the project’s lifecycle.

At the initial stage of the project, BA is required to identity who are the Stakeholders & SMEs, keep in mind stakeholder may be anyone with an interest in the project, and that interest may be positive or negative. If Stakeholders are not properly identified and their needs are not understood then assume that we are in trouble.

As part of the stakeholder analysis, I normally identify high level requirements and list them from Project Charter or Procurement Documents, then identify the stakeholders and their needs from the same location and their interests (Departments) in the project {Stakeholders could be the legal parties, the people who executed the contract, the team members responsible, Head of the departments etc…}. Not all stakeholders should be treated equally on the project. Some are more important than others and depends on requirement to requirement.

The goal of the Stakeholder Analysis is to identify which stakeholder should receive project communications and synchronize with the requirement and grid to visualize their impact and influence.

Once we identify both (Req & SH), we need to synchronize or match requirement to the stakeholder and we should assign the ownership, also try to identify SME for that requirement. SME is like “Guide” to the requirements, he will give us enough information on the particular requirement based on their expertise, but we have to be very careful here… SME may not be aware of scope of the project, as a BA we should able to capture required information for the requirement based on the scope of the project and eventually Stakeholders will help us in making decisions and acceptance for requirements.